Annie of the Undead Read online

  “Of all the things you could have done with your life, the vices you could have cultivated, you had to choose,” she almost couldn’t bring herself to say the dirty word, “boxing.”

  “Right. You would have liked it better if I’d been pregnant at thirteen, then two kids, married, and divorced by twenty.”

  “Now you’re just one of the animals. Why couldn’t you have just been a mooching high school dropout like so many other kids? I never thought I’d say this, but –that little freak who used to stay in her room all the time and watch all those ridiculous science-whatever-you-call-it movies and draw monsters all over her notebooks –I miss her. She was so much less of an aggravation than you are.”

  “Sure, as long as you didn’t know she was one dark fantasy away from going Columbine on all your asses,” I said and took a drag.

  “Oh, Annie, put out that damned cigarette. That’s a terrible, ugly habit.”

  “You should have thought of that when your boyfriend Tim was smoking me out and liquoring me up to keep me from screaming while he had his fun. Oh, but that’s right, you were too busy the snorting lines you bought with his paper.”

  “Shut up!” she hissed. “Things are different now. I found the Lord. He lifted me up out of darkness and filled me with the spirit of the Holy Ghost.”

  “How nice for you. I take it the Lord came with a lot of money.”

  She dabbed on more sludge.

  “Six point two million. Plus a house in Grosse Pointe and a condo in the Turks and Caicos. You know what I have to offer doesn’t come cheap.”

  The bitch had been a high-priced call girl once, before the pregnancies and birth of her kids had made her ugly and ruined her career. At least, that was what she had always told Chris and I. She’d come from the country an unblemished little redneck beauty and made big bucks with her body for a while before we took it all away from her. It wasn’t the all the drugs she did that used up her money and appeal. It was us.

  “That why you’re driving a mid-range sedan?”

  “I’m smart with his money. Think about it as saving for your education. We were both hoping you would get your GED, then maybe go to college. He knows a dean at Bryn Mawr. Maybe we could get you in there. You could make something less embarrassing of yourself than a boxer. Perhaps your colorful past could be spun into sounding a little more…romantic.”

  “Don’t minimize, mythologize.”

  “Jeffrey’s planning on running for office next year. You being in college would help our campaign.”

  A politician. So good I would never meet him.

  “So tell me, does this one rape little girls?”

  My mother closed the compact with a hard snap.

  “Don’t bring your baggage into this. Jeffrey is a man of God. He’s the one who lifted me up. He showed me the light, like I’m trying to do for you right now.”

  “For my own good, of course.”

  She tilted her head dismissively.

  “God loves you, Annie, whatever I may think. Just think of it that way if you hate me so much. But come back to us. Come into the light.”

  A few flurries began to drift down from the sky. The storm was coming. Anjelah’s wails still filled the little street. My ears pricked at a more distant sound –that of police and fire truck sirens a little more than a mile off. One was headed away, the other steadily approaching. I knew which was which.

  “The light is not for me, Mother. Don’t come looking for me again.”

  I cut out of there, at first at a walk, my mother’s voice chasing me with its banal arguments, but as soon as I turned the corner out of the cul-de-sac, I broke into a dead run. I had maybe a minute and a half to get the hell on before the cavalry showed, and while I didn’t think they’d waste a helicopter on me, they sure might come looking for me in their patrol cars.

  I really didn’t want to go back inside, not really. I wanted out, out of everything –maybe even out of the world. As far out as possible, at least.

  I knew of only one thing that could dull the pain. Drugs? No. Hot sex? No. Nickelback? God no. A gerbil up the…? Okay, now you’re just being sick.

  No, fighting. I had to get back into the ring and out of this heinous pod-body I’d developed in jail. I had to get back to the one place where things made sense –or at least kept me so goddamn busy and beat up I didn’t have time to think about how I was miserable. The ring is the one place where it doesn’t matter that your mom’s a glorified whore, or that your pseudo step daddy thought your being eight years old no significant barrier to his sexual desires for you, or your brother’s head got blown off by some faceless insurgent, or that you can’t get a real job because you’ve been incarcerated, and you never had any white friends because you were half black, and you never had any black friends because you were half white, or maybe you never had any friends because you inherited bitch genes from your whore mother, the way you inherited bad hair genes that made a bush so massive on your head that you couldn’t beat it down with a Bush Hog. The ring is the one place where none of that has to hold you back. Maybe it even helps you a little.

  Problem was, I had gotten my ass kicked out of my old training facility –that little business about not sleeping with the owner. There was another guy in town who was good. He had produced some winners. He’d been professional once, and he’d trained professionals. He lived above the gym he owned and managed. I decided right that moment that I needed –nay, had to talk to him. It would be another two or three hour walk, especially with this –what was it, snow? sleet? sneet? –kicking in, but I didn’t see that I had a choice. The alternative was to start thinking about life, the universe, and everything. Ick.

  I set out again through the intestines of Detroit.

  By the time I reached the gym, the sneet had turned to rain, then drizzle, then sneet again several times over. As I was never a fan of sneet, I did not greet the locked door with much patience. I laid into it solidly with my fist.

  BAM! BAM! BAM!

  …Nothing.

  BAM! BAM! BAM! BAM! BAM! BAM!

  …Nothing.

  BAMBAM! BAMBAM! BAMBAM! ...BAM!

  A little noise inside.

  BAM! …BAM! …BAM! …

  Some cursing. Feet on stairs.

  BAMMITYBAMMITYBAMMITYBAM!!

  “Okay! Goddamnit! I’m coming. It’d better be the friggin’ Rapture out there, ‘cause I am not comin’ out for some asshole bleedin’ in the street. And if you’re looking to rob me, you’ve come to the wrong place. I’ve got a whole commemorative box of twelve-gauge shells with your name on ‘em, whoever you are!”

  He reached the door and must have looked through the fisheye, because he opened the inner door a crack and stared through the iron outer door. Rand Furlough’s old face was grizzled with nighttime beard growth. He had a knit cap on that nearly hid his cauliflower ears. He squinted into the intermittent light of the streetlamp dying over my head. The mentioned twelve gauge was in his hand.

  “Angry Annie Eastwood? Didn’t they put you away? What in hell are you doing standing out there, freezing your ass off in this Michigan piss? You walkin’ on Queer Street? Get on home before you get froze or get arrested, whichever gets you first.”

  “I want you to train me. I want to fight for you.”

  “What? Do you have any idea what time it is? I don’t have any idea what time it is. You know why? Because it’s just not natural to be out at whatever time this is.”

  “I want you to train me. Just tell me that you will, and I’ll go.”

  He rubbed his head as though the action would warm up his brain.

  “Try Calhoun’s or The Champs. One of them’ll take you. I’m not looking for fighters right now.”

  “That’s cat shit. They’re no good, and you’re always looking for new fighters. I’m good. Tenacious. You said so yourself in that interview-“

  “Yes, yes,” he snapped, “After you beat Alvarez and Washington –two of mine. You don’t have to remi
nd me.”

  “Apparently I do.”

  “You know what, Annie –Goddamnit, it’s cold! How are you standing out there? I’m not talking about this now with you. You go home, or wherever it is that you go, and come back during decent daylight hours, and we’ll talk –or, you know what, don’t bother. Don’t come back at all. You’re not my kind of fighter, Eastwood.”

  He started to close the door.

  “Wait, what are you talking about? You don’t have a type! You take slow ones, fast ones, fat ones –you even take stupid ones.”

  “But I don’t take dangerous ones.”

  He paused in closing the door.

  “You’re dangerous. You want to hurt people –not just inside the ropes. Your resume is half rap-sheet. You’ve been convicted of burglary, assault on one of your opponents at a bar two hours after you totaled her in the ring, and God knows what else, and you’ve got an armed kidnapping charge that you’re probably guilty of that you wheedled your way out of somehow.”

  “Hey, it was Short John who kidnapped me. I just turned the tables and took him for a joyride when he was too chicken to shoot me. He put a gun to my head while I was driving –so the heat showed up right after the crash, and I took his weapon–”

  Furlough waved his hand in my face.

  “It doesn’t matter. You run with a bad crowd. You make trouble. You attract trouble. I run a clean operation here. I do pretty well. I don’t need someone like you comin’ in here, stirrin’ things up –next thing I know you’ve got my janitor’s arm busted, or one of my fighters crippled over some dumb argument, or some nutjob coming in here tearin’ up the place lookin’ for you, or the cops showing up at my door. I let you in, and I’ve got complications. I don’t need complications. I’ve got a double bypass and a busted eardrum and a leg with enough titanium in it to set off every metal detector in the airport. I might not survive taking you on, and to tell you the truth, you’re past your prime anyway. You’re twenty-seven. You’ve spent a good piece of your fighting years so far in lockup. I don’t think you’re worth rehabilitating. You don’t pull punches, you rabbit punch, and I don’t think I’ve ever heard of you finishing a bout with less than two warnings from the ref. You’re one hair away from killing somebody and ending up in the slam for the rest of your life. You’re bad, Eastwood. Plain bad. Now get out of here before I call the cops.”

  He started to close the door. I saw my chance slipping away in that sneet sputtering light. There was something else dying with it too, something that Furlough couldn’t have known he was killing. I reached out for it desperately.

  “I can change, Mister Furlough.”

  Then he laughed. It was a short, cynical laugh, and it stabbed.

  “People like you don’t change, Eastwood. You just say you’re gonna. I don’t know if you were born mean, but you’re gonna die that way.”

  He closed and locked the door in my face.

  “Yeah?” I called. “Well maybe one of these days I’ll beat your ass! I’ll put some god damned titanium in that other leg! I’d be happy to do a little time for that, you wrinkled old cocksucker!”

  But there came no answer. I stood there alone while the Michigan skies shit on my head, and the street lamp overhead flickered out.

  2

  Never Swoon (or How to Attract a Vampire)

  I stalked along the disheveled street pockmarked like the moon or like a crack whore’s face. Damn city government didn’t care about these back streets. They were forgotten, like the people who lived, worked, and squabbled for society’s crumbs down here at the bottom of the drain. There just wasn’t the revenue to take care of them. Businesses were falling like dominos, the well-off flying like snowbirds to places like Ann Arbor and Grand Rapids. The auto industry was a bust, and the tech one too. A lot more folks were unemployed these days than had been when I was a kid. A lot more people were turning to crime. More power to ‘em. Detroit was becoming Gotham. And Batman? That narcissistic, OCD, PTSD, martyr-syndrome, warmongering head case was nowhere to be seen. Maybe he was in Chicago.

  Me? I was still right here. Detroit, my home, my adoptive mother, who had suckled me at her teats of Faygo pop, breathed her CO-poisoned breath into my lungs, crooned me a lullaby with the clashing discordance of the Insane Clown Posse, and tucked me away in a crib of concrete, steel, and razor wire, could kiss my jail-fattened ass. I hated the bitch.

  In an expression of my love for old Detroit, and for Michigan, and for the world in general and all the delightful things all of them had done to me, I picked up a beer bottle that had been laying in the center of the road and threw it as hard as I could into the Badd Burger sign that sat dark up on its pole above the abandoned restaurant. I wanted to put that asinine Badd Burger bulldog’s eye out. I hated him just laughing up there, eating his burger with his obscenely oversized mouth, eating forever when I didn’t have a dime to spend to calm the monster in my stomach. That’s why I had gotten so fat in jail, damn it, because I’d spent my first years of life scrounging for food at the neighbors’ houses because the refrigerator at home was empty. My mom never liked to cook, and she always had boyfriends to take her out, and it just never crossed her mind that her kids might be hungry –and god damn that dog for laughing like that, with his eyes crossed and his big chain, and that huge, greasy Badd Burger. God damn him!

  But the beer bottle bounced off the sign like the dog was made of stainless steel. The bottle shattered into ten zillion pieces on the pavement.

  God damn that dog!

  I found something else –a can, to throw. I threw it. It did less than the bottle, bouncing off with a pitiful “clink”.

  I lobbed a rock, then a hubcap. Nothing. Not so much as a chipped tooth in that gloating, wrinkly face. Jail had weakened my arm so much.

  Finally, I picked up a piece of the curb that had been busted off by some tight-turning truck and hurled it. I didn’t aim. I was too furious. I just threw wild, and it went past the Badd Bulldog and arched through the air, and smashed through the glass front of the empty restaurant.

  Crash!

  Ooooh, now that was satisfying.

  I looked around for another projectile and found something even better. I found a tailpipe.

  I had picked it up and started forward with murderous intent, when a vehicle turned out from a nearby side street, and its single headlight blinded me with its radiance.

  I paused momentarily, half expecting the vehicle to pass on by. Its one headlight and sans-muffler growl told me it wasn’t a cop, and most anybody else will stay out of the way when they see you wielding a tailpipe in the middle of the street. They just figure you’ve got business to take care of, and as long as it doesn’t involve them, they’re usually happy to keep it so.

  But as the big old sedan ground to a halt, and the doors on either side swung open, I realized that this situation was about to be the exception to the rule. As two men emerged from the glare of the headlights, I recognized them as Short John’s boys.

  One of them was carrying a crowbar. I threw the tailpipe at him as another man emerged from the driver’s door. It was Short John.

  He yelled, “You fuckin’ stand right there, bitch! Don’t you fuckin’ run, you fuckin’ cunt!”

  And of course run was exactly what I fuckin’ did. Like a hellhound.

  Like a fat hellhound. Like a fat out-of-shape hellhound with nothing but a buffalo jerky to eat and no sleep in twenty-four hours. I was breathing hard before I’d taken thirty steps. At least I was wearing a sport bra.

  I knew immediately I was going to have to lose the duffel, and with it everything from Chris that wasn’t on my body. I did not hesitate. I threw it to the side of the road as I ran. I still had the Ka-Bar and his Zippo with the smiley skull and crossbones of his military company scratched into it. Maybe I could stab myself or set myself on fire.

  I veered off the road between Badd Burger and another building, eliminating the advantages of speed and light that the car gave my pursuer
s. I cut back through the parking lot and past a pocket-sized church that simply said “Jesus House” on the side in big block letters. I was headed for cover –any kind of cover. I knew I couldn’t outrun these guys. They were fitter and faster than I was. If they were who I thought they were –the thugs who usually rolled with Short John –I was finished.

  There was a neighborhood across the next street. If I could get to it, I might be able to lose them among the houses and numerous side streets. I jumped down from the cement embankment at the back of the church into the road, going for broke.

  But I wasn’t fast enough. I felt a hand grab at Chris’s jacket, slide off, and try again. I couldn’t push it any harder. My pursuer got hold of my arm.

  I was spun around like a lashing whip. I made one play for freedom, but he was gripping too tight, and he was too, too strong. This was Candyman, a middleweight fighter with a shit career shot by lack of talent and rape and sexual battery charges. But he was still mean enough to be an enforcer and maybe take that attempted rape charge to the next level.

  I pulled so hard against his grip that all the buttons tore off the front of Chris’s jacket.

  “Hold the fuck still, bitch!” Candyman commanded.

  I wasn’t ready to take a hot hanger in the face like the whore Short John said I was. I loosened my shoulders and slunk out of the jacket like a greased pig, spinning around and running with renewed enthusiasm. Their angry shouts ringing behind me, I bolted between two dumpsters at the end of a strip mall and into the residential area behind.

  They were still hot on my heels. I broke my way through some rotted boards in a privacy fence into one of the pocket-sized backyards, crossed the private patch of mud and, deprived of any more gaps or rot, was forced to climb the other side of the fence.

  The men were bigger than me, and as a result, the fence slowed them down a bit, which gave me half a second to figure out what the hell to do when I found that my escape route was blocked by a wire fence and, more importantly, the gnashing Pit Bull on the other side. There was a narrow alley between the houses on my side and the fence. I dashed into it, trying to keep up that greased pig imitation in its narrow confines. The Pit followed me with crazed eyes, gnawing the fence beside me as I went.